Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

It’s no secret that Facebook is more of a place to share content than create it. With limits on word count and customization, writing an article on Facebook is a hassle. Similarly, self-serve and hosted blog platforms like WordPress prove to be great for creating content, with varying degrees of customization, but attracting an audience or even installing the site often takes expert knowledge. In both scenarios, the content isn’t as much the issue as its distribution.

This conundrum is an ever-present scenario in the eyes of digital content creators. While there are tools and platforms in place to assist with content creation, most won’t help content creators find an audience nor facilitate meaningful relationships with end-users. Let’s take a look at the thriving platforms that are able to attract publishers and content creators whose works elicit emotions that inspire a reader base to share and promote their content.

In terms of social content platforms, Tumblr reigns supreme. It grew from under 170,000 unique monthly visitors in 2007 to over 38M by early 2012, according to D. Steven White. Yahoo!, who acquired the company in early 2013, claims that Tumblr’s rapidly growing mobile base is often unaccounted for, changing the figure of roughly 47.5M monthly visitors to well over 70M.

Why It Works: Tumblr succeeded by introducing its viral repost feature, which allowed users to share funny content on their blog or search through various blogs in a Facebook style newsfeed to curate content relevant to their interests.

How It Works: Tumblr’s best asset is as a complimentary blog to a brand or content marketer, showcasing content that is complimentary to a brand’s interests and inspiration. A great example is the White House, which joined Tumblr to reach a young audience by showcasing beautiful images of America and shedding light on how new policies impact the US.

There was a point where Facebook and Twitter sparked rumors of “Blogging is Dead.” These social media sites showed the world that personal micro-content is here to stay. However, blogging only became more popular as Facebook and Twitter evolved from platforms where users just hang out to platforms where users hang out and share interesting content they create. Content creators had to resort to other mediums to publish, but Facebook sought to change everything with Notes. Notes was clearly a feature implemented after being rebuffed by Yahoo in the acquisition of Tumblr, but Notes has been pushed mainly to obscurity by the new timeline redesign. Still, there is no news of Facebook giving up on the platform and the social giant has over 1.23 billion users.

Why It Works: Facebook Notes was a response to long form publishing platforms that were eating Facebook’s social share like Tumblr and Blogspot. It works simply by being on the world’s largest social platform.

How It Works: Facebook is still the world’s largest social platform and will be for the foreseeable future. Notes can be shared with friends or posted to a timeline, similar to status update, allowing anyone to join the discussion about the content.

Posthaven is another platform that grew out of the ashes of Posterous, the incredibly fast microblogging platform that was acquired by Twitter. PostHaven is young and growing rapidly, and not ashamed to say they will be around much longer than their predecessor. Simple site designs place a strong emphasis on engaging with the content over flashy advertising or news feeds. PostHaven requires users to pay $5 per month for continued usage, but guarantees that price won’t increase ever. The user fees provides a stable source of funding that helps the platform to provide new updates, new functionality and other improvements

Where It Works: The Posterous community, which was very large (over 30M) and included many tech enthusiasts should be in support of this platform as popularity rises.

Another relative newcomer to the blogging world, Olanola mixes social, content customizability, and viewership. This new social content platform allows users to create their own custom websites and begin to immediately engage with a built-in audience through embedded tools and functionality. Olanola features a popularity algorithm that surfaces the most relevant content, based on what the reader is most likely to find interesting and engaging, their preferred verticals/interests, viewing history and content they create on the platform.

Where It Works: As a secondary platform for a brand or content marketer, Olanola allows users to RSS content into the platform to create a microsite or community that engages with their content on the platform.

How It Works: It’s too early to tell, but Olanola is featuring a Viral Blogging Contest to introduce users to the platform at http://www.olanolacontest.com. Create viral content for a chance to win a free iPad.

We are coming up to the last holiday weekend of a wonderful summer. The countdown for back-to-school has begun. Corporate team leaders can’t wait to get their teams back in full strength. Managers are gearing up for strategy meetings to make the last quarter of the year count. Let’s just say it’s “get serious, get back to work” time for the majority of us.

For B2B marketers, this is a good time to review what has worked in this year so far and what needs to change before the year is over. The State of Marketing* report offers valuable insights from over 5,000 global marketers. Let’s examine the top 10 recommendations to cover 3 key areas of marketing. ”The Customer Journey, Mobile and Social.

The Customer Journey

86% of senior level marketers surveyed in the report stress the critical importance of tracking and understanding the customer journey in order to implement an effective marketing strategy. How will you achieve this?

Here are 3 useful recommendations:

Look beyond buyer personas and lifecycle marketing: In our enthusiasm to plan lead generation campaigns based on proper segmentation, we tend to sometimes get carried away with marketing to buyer personas. In the ideal world, every buyer would perfectly fit at least one persona we have thought of. With the increasing demand for personalization, however, B2B marketers need to focus more on the individual behaviours of different buyers instead of planning for broad patterns across different categories.

Trace the customer journey beyond email: Email marketing has stood the test of time as an effective lead generation and nurturing methodology. The limitation of this method when it comes to viewing the customer journey is that email communication is linear and follows a set pattern. You can only trace the customer’s interaction with your brand along that one path of receiving, opening and acting upon email stimulus. In an integrated marketing approach, we need to look beyond email to examine multiple channels, including social, where our customers are spending time. The last thing you want to do is upset a customer by responding officiously to their email while ignoring their much more emotional communication on a social media platform.

Make customer journey mapping a team exercise: You can’t possibly sit in the board room and try to map the full customer journey. There are multiple touchpoints and various people within your organization that can offer keen insights into how your customers react and interact at every stage of the customer journey. A regular brainstorm with your team is a great way to stay updated on what your customers are thinking, feeling, doing, and wanting you to do! Discover the gaps in your marketing strategy where customer experience has suffered, and focus on making improvements rather than trying to sweep those instances away under the carpet.

Mobile

This year is considered the “last call” for joining the mobile marketing train. Experts say it is a is now or never situation because a majority of the corporate workforce now functions as “phablet” users or users with smartphones that have tablet-like screens and features. Here are 4 critical steps you need to take with regard to mobile marketing:

Define your mobile marketing strategy: You will see from your customer journey mapping exercise recommended above that one of the most important and frequent customer touchpoints is facilitated via mobile. In the absence of a clear strategy to optimize customer experience at every mobile-enabled interaction, you are losing a huge opportunity to make an impact on the dominant majority of your buyer population.

Use an integrated approach to manage mobile campaigns: It’s no longer enough to have a mobile campaign once in a while. That is like spike marketing, you may get a sudden peak in lead generation but it won’t last. If your customers are on the go and using their mobile devices 24/7, what choice do you have really? Think about it! Mobile campaigns must become a part of your integrated marketing plan, communicating brand messaging consistent with all other channels and media you are using.

Take advantage of location-based mobile content marketing: 67% of global marketers, according to this report are already doing this. If your business is just starting out to test the waters, a location-based mobile marketing campaign is a better way to test and learn before you spread out nationally or globally. Relevant content served up at the right time, in the right place to your mobile buyers will drive traffic to your target location faster, better, easier. It doesn’t necessarily have to be promotion or offer based either. Remember that the customer journey is more than 70% independent research for the vast majority. If your mobile content fits right in and adds value, you will be more successful in helping the buyer complete that last 30% of the decision making process in your favour.

Monitor mobile analytics to devise loyalty programs: This report shows that more than in-store and web-based loyalty programs, mobile loyalty campaigns have an 86% effectiveness rating. That is huge! When planning your loyalty program, take into account the data from your mobile analytics and incentivize loyalty for your mobile buyers.

Social

While social has become an everyday, all the time phenomenon, it is far from easy. With all the automation available, there is still no silver bullet. Here are 8 Techniques that Work for B2B Social Media. You have to work at social relationships steadily and you can’t expect unrealistic returns. Let me remind you of the 5 Laws of Real Social ROI.

Explore new and niche social channels: Mainstream social media channels may or may not work for your B2B audience. Consider niche channels where your target buyer spends time. For example, we created this exclusive, invitation-only LinkedIn Group for B2B thought leaders. feel free to join and exchange ideas with B2B thought leaders.

Dedicate resources for social marketing: It takes time and effort to do this right. Rather than trying to build volume through more fans, allocate capable and trained resources to run your social campaigns selectively on the channels that work.

Focus on engagement and keep testing: Leave the selling to your sales team or even to your website. On social media, your buyers are looking for meaningful content to engage and enlighten. That’s what you need to do consistently. Conversion is always the ultimate goal, but you can’t make that the primary one, especially on social platforms.

How will you refresh and rejuvenate your B2B marketing efforts? Feel free to add to the list of recommendations above. I look forward to hearing from you, so please leave me a comment.If you would like to receive updates and information about B2B lead generation,please click here.

It’s no secret that Facebook is more of a place to share content than create it. With limits on word count and customization, writing an article on Facebook is a hassle. Similarly, self-serve and hosted blog platforms like WordPress prove to be great for creating content, with varying degrees of customization, but attracting an audience or even installing the site often takes expert knowledge. In both scenarios, the content isn’t as much the issue as its distribution.

This conundrum is an ever-present scenario in the eyes of digital content creators. While there are tools and platforms in place to assist with content creation, most won’t help content creators find an audience nor facilitate meaningful relationships with end-users. Let’s take a look at the thriving platforms that are able to attract publishers and content creators whose works elicit emotions that inspire a reader base to share and promote their content.

In terms of social content platforms, Tumblr reigns supreme. It grew from under 170,000 unique monthly visitors in 2007 to over 38M by early 2012, according to D. Steven White. Yahoo!, who acquired the company in early 2013, claims that Tumblr’s rapidly growing mobile base is often unaccounted for, changing the figure of roughly 47.5M monthly visitors to well over 70M.

Why It Works: Tumblr succeeded by introducing its viral repost feature, which allowed users to share funny content on their blog or search through various blogs in a Facebook style newsfeed to curate content relevant to their interests.

How It Works: Tumblr’s best asset is as a complimentary blog to a brand or content marketer, showcasing content that is complimentary to a brand’s interests and inspiration. A great example is the White House, which joined Tumblr to reach a young audience by showcasing beautiful images of America and shedding light on how new policies impact the US.

There was a point where Facebook and Twitter sparked rumors of “Blogging is Dead.” These social media sites showed the world that personal micro-content is here to stay. However, blogging only became more popular as Facebook and Twitter evolved from platforms where users just hang out to platforms where users hang out and share interesting content they create. Content creators had to resort to other mediums to publish, but Facebook sought to change everything with Notes. Notes was clearly a feature implemented after being rebuffed by Yahoo in the acquisition of Tumblr, but Notes has been pushed mainly to obscurity by the new timeline redesign. Still, there is no news of Facebook giving up on the platform and the social giant has over 1.23 billion users.

Why It Works: Facebook Notes was a response to long form publishing platforms that were eating Facebook’s social share like Tumblr and Blogspot. It works simply by being on the world’s largest social platform.

How It Works: Facebook is still the world’s largest social platform and will be for the foreseeable future. Notes can be shared with friends or posted to a timeline, similar to status update, allowing anyone to join the discussion about the content.

Posthaven is another platform that grew out of the ashes of Posterous, the incredibly fast microblogging platform that was acquired by Twitter. PostHaven is young and growing rapidly, and not ashamed to say they will be around much longer than their predecessor. Simple site designs place a strong emphasis on engaging with the content over flashy advertising or news feeds. PostHaven requires users to pay $5 per month for continued usage, but guarantees that price won’t increase ever. The user fees provides a stable source of funding that helps the platform to provide new updates, new functionality and other improvements

Where It Works: The Posterous community, which was very large (over 30M) and included many tech enthusiasts should be in support of this platform as popularity rises.

Another relative newcomer to the blogging world, Olanola mixes social, content customizability, and viewership. This new social content platform allows users to create their own custom websites and begin to immediately engage with a built-in audience through embedded tools and functionality. Olanola features a popularity algorithm that surfaces the most relevant content, based on what the reader is most likely to find interesting and engaging, their preferred verticals/interests, viewing history and content they create on the platform.

Where It Works: As a secondary platform for a brand or content marketer, Olanola allows users to RSS content into the platform to create a microsite or community that engages with their content on the platform.

How It Works: It’s too early to tell, but Olanola is featuring a Viral Blogging Contest to introduce users to the platform at http://www.olanolacontest.com. Create viral content for a chance to win a free iPad.

It’s no secret that Facebook is more of a place to share content than create it. With limits on word count and customization, writing an article on Facebook is a hassle. Similarly, self-serve and hosted blog platforms like WordPress prove to be great for creating content, with varying degrees of customization, but attracting an audience or even installing the site often takes expert knowledge. In both scenarios, the content isn’t as much the issue as its distribution.

This conundrum is an ever-present scenario in the eyes of digital content creators. While there are tools and platforms in place to assist with content creation, most won’t help content creators find an audience nor facilitate meaningful relationships with end-users. Let’s take a look at the thriving platforms that are able to attract publishers and content creators whose works elicit emotions that inspire a reader base to share and promote their content.

In terms of social content platforms, Tumblr reigns supreme. It grew from under 170,000 unique monthly visitors in 2007 to over 38M by early 2012, according to D. Steven White. Yahoo!, who acquired the company in early 2013, claims that Tumblr’s rapidly growing mobile base is often unaccounted for, changing the figure of roughly 47.5M monthly visitors to well over 70M.

Why It Works: Tumblr succeeded by introducing its viral repost feature, which allowed users to share funny content on their blog or search through various blogs in a Facebook style newsfeed to curate content relevant to their interests.

How It Works: Tumblr’s best asset is as a complimentary blog to a brand or content marketer, showcasing content that is complimentary to a brand’s interests and inspiration. A great example is the White House, which joined Tumblr to reach a young audience by showcasing beautiful images of America and shedding light on how new policies impact the US.

There was a point where Facebook and Twitter sparked rumors of “Blogging is Dead.” These social media sites showed the world that personal micro-content is here to stay. However, blogging only became more popular as Facebook and Twitter evolved from platforms where users just hang out to platforms where users hang out and share interesting content they create. Content creators had to resort to other mediums to publish, but Facebook sought to change everything with Notes. Notes was clearly a feature implemented after being rebuffed by Yahoo in the acquisition of Tumblr, but Notes has been pushed mainly to obscurity by the new timeline redesign. Still, there is no news of Facebook giving up on the platform and the social giant has over 1.23 billion users.

Why It Works: Facebook Notes was a response to long form publishing platforms that were eating Facebook’s social share like Tumblr and Blogspot. It works simply by being on the world’s largest social platform.

How It Works: Facebook is still the world’s largest social platform and will be for the foreseeable future. Notes can be shared with friends or posted to a timeline, similar to status update, allowing anyone to join the discussion about the content.

Posthaven is another platform that grew out of the ashes of Posterous, the incredibly fast microblogging platform that was acquired by Twitter. PostHaven is young and growing rapidly, and not ashamed to say they will be around much longer than their predecessor. Simple site designs place a strong emphasis on engaging with the content over flashy advertising or news feeds. PostHaven requires users to pay $5 per month for continued usage, but guarantees that price won’t increase ever. The user fees provides a stable source of funding that helps the platform to provide new updates, new functionality and other improvements

Where It Works: The Posterous community, which was very large (over 30M) and included many tech enthusiasts should be in support of this platform as popularity rises.

Another relative newcomer to the blogging world, Olanola mixes social, content customizability, and viewership. This new social content platform allows users to create their own custom websites and begin to immediately engage with a built-in audience through embedded tools and functionality. Olanola features a popularity algorithm that surfaces the most relevant content, based on what the reader is most likely to find interesting and engaging, their preferred verticals/interests, viewing history and content they create on the platform.

Where It Works: As a secondary platform for a brand or content marketer, Olanola allows users to RSS content into the platform to create a microsite or community that engages with their content on the platform.

How It Works: It’s too early to tell, but Olanola is featuring a Viral Blogging Contest to introduce users to the platform at http://www.olanolacontest.com. Create viral content for a chance to win a free iPad.

There is this tidbit from my favourite blogger. She compares which is better between competition and collaboration. Collaboration obviously seems more beneficial in almost any kind of situation. She ended off with a funny thought as to what would happen if both the mother and the father of a family have a competition to serve the family members. Haha, that will be a disaster…

Speaking of which, we might have noticed that people who are very highly successful in their particular field has become so not due to competition but because they love what they are doing. If I give an example of a Kollywood superstar, Kamal Hassan, who is an epitome of acting (has won 171 awards, more than any actor in film history) is best at what he does because he loves it so much and not because he wants to compete with other actors. Think about food as an example. Home cooked food is better prepared than commercial food simply because the former is done out of love and commercial food is done out of competition.

What is the best way to achieve creativity? We know that the mind has to be open first of all. Much like how the saying goes “the mind works the same way as the parachute, it can only function if its open.” To achieve the full potential of creativity, one ought not to be creative with the intention of producing something creative. Nice paradox, isn’t it? The person should explore at their own leisure and discover things along the way. That is how most inventions are born. Some people call it “by accident”. Irregardless, inventions are usually done unintentionally. They could not have happened if the inventors were concerned about the end result.

“We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.” – Eric Hoffer

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